Word count: 2656 | Since last entry: 1452

A productive day at work, some coding and some meetings, very little drama. Got home from work reasonably early, fixed an interesting chicken-and-cranberry recipe Kate clipped from the paper, then sat down to write much earlier than usual. Still going to bed later than I should. Kate’s still having problems with the iPod… it’s supposed to be easy to use, but under Windows it’s sometimes kind of flaky.

Don’t get too excited about the word count above. Only about 200 words of that is new; the rest is copied in from the previous draft (which isn’t really a “draft”, it was finished and submitted and came very close at several markets, including a rewrite request from F&SF). But I did make some significant changes in the copied material. I’m giving myself a gold star for the day.

A snippet: “Just getting the black holes to stabilize was a nightmare. The only tools we had were superconducting magnets the size of small moons, and if one of them decided to quench you wouldn’t even have the time to say your prayers. We lost half the hole team in one instant, when someone bobbled the matter feed and hole number four went straight from black to white without stopping for breakfast. We had invested a substantial portion of the genome money in the latest backup and restore equipment, of course, but the prospect of sudden death was still terrifying.”